


The Outlaw’s Son

by ladyrose (orphan_account)



Series: prose [1]
Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: <— an understatement, Angst, Bad Parenting, Family Drama, Historical, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Other, Pre-Canon, Smoking, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-18 23:02:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20320957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/ladyrose
Summary: Lyle Morgan never made much effort to be in Arthur’s life before.All that changes when Beatrice died.





	The Outlaw’s Son

Lyle Morgan was a big man.

Broad across the shoulders and tall.

But here he looks small.

Folded in on himself in the Hasting’s home and wearing the smell of smoke and several days without a lick of fresh water like a second skin. There’s a sightly scar about two inches long from the lobe of one ear and down along the underside of his jaw.

It’s still healing.

He prods at it absentmindedly as Mr. Hastings chews away at his tobacco and talks all about summer. What a fine boy his Arthur was. A real fine boy. And what a fine wife Beatrice was. Loyal and sharp and always with a kind word. May she Rest In Peace.

Lyle Morgan drags a thumb along that scar and listens to him talk. When Mr. Hastings stops, he says, “What was it?”

“Sorry, sir?” Mr. Hastings says. He drifted a bit. Arthur watches from the squat little stool by the hearth and keeps quiet. Watches him shift the wad of tobacco to the opposite cheek and clear his throat. “Oh, you mean...”

“Beatrice.”

“Yes. She...it was consumption, sir. I’m sorry. I thought I said it. We were trying to help where we could, you’ve my word on it. But you...surely you know how it is.”

“I know,” Lyle Morgan says. “I know. Thank you.”

And they say some other things, and it’s not a long time, and when they are finished Mrs. Hastings who had made herself scarce the duration of the conversation came to pat Arthur’s cheek and tell him he was a fine boy. A real fine boy. And then before long, he is passed hands.

He is watching the back of his fathers head as they make their way down, down, the valley and onto the road that stretched all along the coast. Caleb Hastings had said that. That it went all along the coast. Arthur hadn’t believed him because Caleb was only fifteen and he hadn’t been farther than to the trading post with his father because he told him so.

Caleb had always made it out like he was worldly, but Arthur didn’t think him to be so much.

He never had to light up a lantern, throw on a coat, and make the mile long trek to the neighbors house in the middle of the night because his mother had died.

But that was before, and so...

They ride in silence. Lyle only asks him if he’s cold once and then it’s silence again.

And that’s all Arthur remembers about that.

Those first couple of weeks.

* * *

They come across a barn several days out.

They spend a night there.

There’s two horses, a bull, and a heifer, and a mama pig and some piglets in there. Lyle lights a lantern hanging at the door and circles the barn like a caged animal and once he’s checked every corner, he ascends into the hayloft.

Arthur pulls away from the piglets and follows.

“You hungry?” He asks. They settle into the hay and he sits stiffly, hangs the lantern on a hook above them. Flipping open his bag and perusing the things inside.

Arthur was very hungry.

“No, sir,” he says.

Lyle finds a can of strawberries and cracks it open with his knife, and wordlessly puts it between them.

“You remember much about me, boy?” He asks, poking at a strawberry with the tip of his knife.

“Some, sir.”

“Like what?”

“You came one winter and was bleedin’,” Arthur muses. “Ma patched you up and was fussing.”

“I remember that.”

Arthur nods and leans back, picking hay off his shirt.

“What else?”

“That’s about it, sir.”

“I remember _you_,” Lyle says, as though Arthur were a patron he recognized from a saloon somewhere once and not his flesh and blood son. “You were a little baby and then you were about this high,” he raises an arm some ways above the hay, “And now...how old are you?”

Arthur runs the back of a hand under his nose. “Eleven.”

“About as lanky as I was at that age,” Lyle snorts. He spears the strawberry and extends it.

Arthur takes it and nods his thanks.

They sit in silence watching the farmhouse in the distance and eating the strawberries. Then Lyle says, “We’re going to California. You ever been there?”

Arthur shakes his head around a mouthful of berries.

“It’s alright. San Francisco. It’s big.”

Lyle extinguishes the lantern shortly after and reclines into the hay without another word. Arthur does the same.

“Can you ride?” Lyle asks into the dark.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” And then, minutes later, soft snores comes from his side of the loft.

Sleep finds Arthur almost immediately.

* * *

They reach California and it doesn’t look much different than Oregon, and Arthur wouldn’t have known it were California hadn’t Lyle said so.

They stop at a saloon and Lyle hitches his horse in the back and watches as Arthur hitches the horse they took from that barn back in Oregon alongside.

“Where’d you learn to ride?” He asks.

“Caleb Hastings,” Arthur says.

Lyle hums and walks in the back of the saloon. Arthur follows.

The inside of the saloon is nearly empty at that time of the morning. Chairs still stacked on the tables and a couple of women bundled in shawls and sipping coffee at a table near the rear.

The bartender is counting bottles on a shelf behind the counter and writing something in a little book when they enter, and his eyes fly immediately to Arthur with a frown.

“Hey, no kids in h—“

“Easy, Gil. He’s _my_ kid,” Lyle rumbles, and the bartenders eyes go wide. That little book long forgotten and returned to a spot under the register.

“_Morgan_?” He says in a half whisper. Arthur doesn’t know why. The women barely glance up and they’re the only ones there. “I’ll be damned. Thought you were did in awhile ago.”

“Came close enough,” Lyle sighs, sitting at the bar. “You selling, yet?”

“For you,” the bartender, Gil, says pulling a bottle full of honey colored liquid from the top shelf and pouring a little glass full. “Where you headed?”

“Well away from these parts.”

“And this is your kid, you said?” A nod towards Arthur.

“Yeah,” Lyle says. Takes a sip from the glass. “Arthur.”

Gil nods and Arthur nods back.

“I need a word,” Lyle says, swirling the contents of his glass. “In confidence.”

“Private?”

Lyle drains the rest of his glass and Gil leans away from them.

“Gemma!” He calls across the room. One of the women looks up, dark hair rolled and piled high on her head, secured with a scarf. “Watch this kid for me, will you?”

She looks at Arthur, back to Gil, then back to Arthur again. Gestures him over with a smile and he sits with the women for about an hour. Watching them as they brought out cards and played a game, and answering their questions. His name is Arthur. He’s eleven. No ma’am, he doesn’t have his letters. No, ma’am. He’s not thirsty or hungry, thank you. And some other sort of innocuous things until his head is full of flowery perfumes and the clatter of wagon wheels passing outside.

By the time his father and Gil finish their talk, his father is swaying as he stands and gripping the edge of the counter for balance. Gemma pats him on the arm. _It’s alright, sweetheart,_ she says with a smile. _He just needs to rest_.

He rests upstairs until late afternoon, and Arthur is there when he wakes up.

“Five hundred dollars,” he says, blinking away sleep and running his palm along that scar at his throat.

“For what?” Arthur asks.

“Your old man’s head,” Lyle answers.

* * *

San Francisco is draped in a heavy fog when they arrive.

They leave their horses at the mouth of the creek and take a ferry across. They take to the deck and Lyle procures a cigar from the breast pocket of his jacket, dropping onto a bench with a grunt and cupping his hand around the match to light it.

“Don’t lean over them rails, boy,” he says. Inhales deeply and waves away the plume of smoke he exhales through his nose. And Arthur minds him. He does. He watches with his chin on the rail as the ferry grunts and groans across the water. The most water he’s ever seen in all his life. Extending on and on forever, rising and falling until it almost seemed to fall off the world altogether in the way out distance.

And for some reason, he thinks about his mother.

Wonders if she ever seen something like that.

Realizes a heartbeat later that she wouldn’t be able to if she had never.

She had told him once upon a time that the flowers that grew around their property were little joys. He doesn’t think that’s what they were really called, but that’s what she called them. Little joys. Pieces of beauty and grace grown in places that were wild and ruthless. He left some at her grave the day the Hastings helped buried her. He took one when he left that day with his father. Dead and dried at the bottom of his satchel, though still a piece of his life before. A piece of her. A way she could still, in a roundabout way, see the ocean.

“When we get to San Francisco,” Lyle says, tearing him from his thoughts. “I’m going to teach you how to pickpocket.”

A lot of things are disguised as an art. A lot of sins are disguised as an art. The art of thieving, the art of lying. Arthur learns both. Quickly. He was always a fast learner. Lyle drinks that evening in the attic room of a boarding house. Drinks and says he’s proud of him.

Arthur sleeps that night restfully.

* * *

They stay in San Francisco for a week and a half.

They go about life at their own devices for the most part in the mornings.

Lyle disappears for hours on end and Arthur doesn’t know where he goes. So he takes to the streets and pickpockets and buys himself a meal.

San Francisco is loud and big and he appreciates it.

Appreciates that he can disappear in the hundreds of faces and not have to be anything or anyone if he doesn’t want to.

Sometimes he goes down to the pier and watch the fishermen prepare to launch into that wide, wide blue. He stops by enough that they come to greet him when they’re taking their breakfast, tearing into sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and drinking from little pewter cups. And when they’re done, they show him how to do tricks with several cups and a little pearl button.

The trick was in your hand. Have them focus one way and you can do almost anything with the other hand. His father said something similar, though his lessons were always marred with frustration and sharp glares.

Lyle always returns to their room at the end of the day. Sometimes Arthur thinks he won’t. When the night begins to rise and he starts to doze in the windowsill, cheek resting on his forearms where he’d been watching the street below. But always the door would open and his father would come in. Sometimes sober, most times not. Pat his head as he passes him and drop heavily onto his bed. Boots on and all.

“She was one of the best women I knew,” he’d slur. Hiccup. “I swear on my pa’s grave she was.”

And Arthur wouldn’t say a word, and Lyle would go to sleep.

Sometimes, he’d talk a bit.

About things he’s done and the woman he might just have loved truly. Arthur never knew if he were drunk or sober during those bouts. One evening he comes in and unties the knot in his boots with great care. And he sits in the little chair by the window and begins to polish his gun in silence.

Arthur had watched him from his cot across the room. He had quit waiting up for him about the fourth day in. There was a feeling just below the surface. Something hot and white and it made Arthur’s heart hammer the harder he thought about it. Something nameless but powerful enough that he wants to shout and throw something and demand an answer to a million questions.

Lyle speaks first.

“I ain’t a good pa am I?”

Arthur blinks in surprise. His father works at a spot on the barrel of his gun, and looks up at him with sharp blue-green eyes when he doesn’t answer.

“Well?”

“You...you’re...”

“Don’t lie about it, boy. I don’t appreciate lyin’.”

“You taught me how to do an awful lot of it,” Arthur snaps before he can stop himself. He clamps his mouth shut the minute the words leave and Lyle blanches.

“Arthur,” he says low enough to be a warning. “You watch that mouth of yours unless you want a pop in it. I ain’t raisin’ no kid who talks back, you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, sir.”

Truth of the matter is, he wasn’t raising anything. Nothing but a thief under the pretense of surviving.

_It’s survival_, he told Arthur.

Survival felt a lot like a never ending cycle of nerves and desperation.

Especially when you had to survive with a stranger.

* * *

One morning, a man comes to the boarding house. It’s raining outside and he brings it in. Starts a little puddle in the threshold of the door when Lyle opens it, and looks between father and son curiously before stepping inside.

“That’s Arthur,” Lyle says. “My son.”

“No shit,” the man grins. “You two look like twins. I didn’t know you were a father, Morgan.”

Lyle shrugs and turns to pull the extra chair they kept against the wall close to the little wood stove. The man takes a seat and takes off his hat. Dark hair sticking to his cheeks and neck, and the leather of his coat still shining with rain.

“I can’t stay long,” he says. “I’m glad you found me though. I thought you’d swung.”

“Gil told me you were still around here,” Lyle says and frees his flask out of his pocket, extending it towards the man in invitation.

It’s refused with a wave of the hand.

“What the hell happened up there?”

“It went up. Whole thing was a set up. I think James was the rat.”

“Nat’ll be furious....”

“Ain’t in our hands anymore. He was the first to go, I think,” Lyle pauses, brings the flask to his lips, lowers it. “He couldn’t escape it, could he? Would’ve died one way or another, you figure.”

“Such is our life.”

“I guess.”

“So, what? They were waiting?”

Lyle nods. “We got to the bank and there was all these men out front. We kinda just...kept on past. Didn’t even stop. But they knew who we were. There was a bit of a scene. They arrested Aaron and Samuel. Shot James and Kit. I got away. Went back the way of my ladies place. Thought I could hide out that way a bit.” He takes a sip. “She had passed.”

The man swears under his breath, runs a hand along his mouth.

“I got a five hundred dollar bounty back in Oregon,” Lyle says. “Gil said they’re starting to talk here in California too.”

“What’ll you do?”

“I don’t know,” Lyle glances towards Arthur. Quickly. Then back to the man. “A lot of plans changed. You know where Nat is now?”

“Everyone’s split up. Keeping their heads down, I think. Nat might still be in Oregon. You know how he is.” A pause, and then, “I think I’ll have some of that drink now.”

Lyle passes it to him and the man takes a healthy sip. Clearing his throat loudly when he returns it and frowning.

“That’s hot isn’t it?” He splutters. “What is it?”

“Kit shared it with me some time ago. He brought it with him from Kentucky.”

“Kit was from Kentucky? He never told me. We could’a been cousins.”

“It’s a small world,” Lyle agrees. “And this country ain’t so big.” He takes another sip and passes it back.

“To Kit,” the man says, raising the flask.

“To Kit.”

“And to your lady.”

“And to Beatrice.”

They drink some more until the room grows warm and the man sheds his jacket, folding it across the back of his chair to dry. And he stays awhile and Arthur is all but forgotten. A shadow along the wall. Then the man turns slow and heavy, eyes slowly blinking and extends a hand.

“Arthur, was it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fitz Harrison.”

They shake hands.

Later on, much later, Arthur would remember the exchange for a few reasons.

One, because it seemed that these type of men in that type of business took a handshake seriously. Took sharing a name seriously. A true name, at that.

And two, because about two years later, Fitz Harrison was killed during a card game. The rumor was that he cheated, though that were just rumor. The ones who were wise to what and who he was thought otherwise. It would’ve came one way or another. But such was their life.

* * *

Saint Gabriels Home is an imposing building on the other side of the city. It’s brick and stands four stories high with wide enough windows that it looks like plenty of light would enter, though none seem to come from inside.

Lyle and Arthur go down one afternoon by cable car.

Arthur had never been in a cable car before and thinks it’s wildly unimpressive. He and his father stand in the back watching the shop fronts and the people milling around them fly past, and they step off on a busy street teeming with life and color.

“I got some business to take care of on the other side of town,” Lyle had announced the morning after Fitz Harrison came by. “You’re comin’ too.”

So it’s how Arthur finds himself on the back steps of Saint Gabriels under strict orders to stay put, on a little avenue that looks to be only the sort to walk through, though a man with a mule drawn cart makes his way up the narrow path with the biggest block of ice Arthur ever saw.

The door opens behind him and a nun pokes her head out, starting a bit when she sees Arthur. She smiles at him and he nods back.

“Morning, young man. Are you lost?”

“No,” he says. “I’m waitin’ on my father.”

Something shifts in her face, though it’s gone in a flash. Her smile doesn’t falter.

“If you get too warm in this sun,” she continues. “You just knock on this door, alright?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She leaves him.

He returns to watching the street.

Across the path are a line of joined shops, shaded by the overhang of the balcony above them and doubly so by the young orange trees lining the walkway.

A finely dressed man walks down that walkway with a little gray terrier. Both dog and owner sporting a heavy gray mustache that makes Arthur smile a bit. A man comes out of a shop with a package and greets the man. Stoops to scratch the dog behind the ears. The conversation is proper and prim. The man with the dog says something that makes the other laugh. The other pulls out a handkerchief and dabs two quick pats at the corner of his mouth immediately after. The man with the dog checks a pocket watch and makes a show of being surprised. Both men pinch the brim of their hats as they go on their way.

Arthur decides he misses Oregon a bit.

Shortly after, a young woman comes marching around the corner with a wide hat full of feathers and a pale green dress flapping behind her as she stalks quickly past the shops.

“‘Delia!” A man’s voice. He appears around the corner and trails after her, hat in hand and looking for all the world to be as miserable as a man could get. “‘_Delia_. Darling. It’s not what it seems—“

A boy walking on the same side of the avenue as Saint Gabriels pauses to watch the scene with Arthur, snickering and sharing an amused glance with him as the woman doesn’t break stride and the man hopelessly follows.

“Cordelia—!“

“My _sister_, John! _Really_?”

They don’t hear the end of it. The couple—if they could still be called that—disappears around the corner.

The boy turns to Arthur, a brown bag of some dark nuts in one hand as the other hand brushes dusky brown hair out from his eyes.

“I never knew they let you all go out unsupervised,” he says.

“I don’t live here. I’m waitin’ for someone.”

“Oh,” the boy says sheepishly. “Apologies.”

“I’m not offended.”

“I’m Peter, by the way.”

“Arthur.”

“You’re not from this way, are you Arthur?”

Arthur bristles at that. Sizes the boy up. He’s at most a year or two older than him. A good head taller. Arthur lifts his chin defiantly and narrows his eyes.

“What of it?”

“I can hear it,” Peter says, tapping an ear for emphasis. “Your accent.”

“My _what_?”

Peter laughs. “Where are you from?”

It seems an innocent enough question to answer in truth. “Oregon.”

“It’s wild country up there isn’t it? Oregon?”

“Some.”

“You have your wits about you, I’ll give you that,” Peter grins, and as an afterthought. “Would you like some chestnuts?”

They spend the better part of the afternoon on the wall at the end of the avenue watching the street. The street, and in the distance, the strip of blue that was the ocean.

They talk.

Peters family came out to California during the forties and stayed ever since. They were from back east. Kansas area.

Arthur knew only that his mother’s family had lived in Oregon for some time and the property that was his home had formerly been his grandfathers.

Lyle, he realizes with an almost painful pinch, he knows nothing about.

They share Peters chestnuts and occasionally throw some at the backs of unsuspecting gentlemen for the sake of seeing them swivel around with a look of utter confusion, never once looking up at the boys perched on the wall like a pair of cats, turning beet red from held in laughter.

And when the sky starts to darken into a rust orange, and the wind blows chillier, Peter stretches and crumples up the now empty bag.

“I best be heading back now, Arthur,” he announces. “My ma’ll throw a fit if I’m late to the table again.”

Arthur swallows around the dryness that comes suddenly in his throat and ducks his head.

“What about you?” Peter asks.

“I’m going to head back to them steps and wait for...my acquaintance.”

“If they’re late,” Peter says, not missing a beat. “You come to Hyde Street, up this way,” he points further down the street, “and then right. And ask anyone for the Yancey’s and they’ll point you straight our way. Whole block knows us. Ma will give you a bowl.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

“If you’re ever around again, look me up,” Peter says, sliding off the wall and racing up the street, pausing to yell over his shoulder. “Yancey! Don’t forget it!”

Arthur makes his way back to the boys home and resumes his spot on the stairs.

By now, a man with a lantern and a step stool is making his way down the avenue lighting the little light posts and singing softly to himself.

_Listen to the Mockingbird, listen to the Mockingbird_  
_ Oh the Mockingbird is singing oe'er her grave_  
Listen to the Mockingbird, listen to the Mockingbird  
Still singing where the yellow roses grow

Arthur listens and the door opens again behind him. The same nun leans out.

“Young man,” she says. “Would you like to come in for a warm plate?”

“No, thank you.” He says.

She lingers a moment, nods once and goes back inside. The shops across the avenue are preparing to close. Arthur thinks of the little dried flower he carried with him and tries to find a Little Joy. It’s hard to find one.

He doesn’t know when exactly, but his father returns.

His gait is recognizable. He walks with his shoulders, hands in his pockets. Arthur pushes down the swell of anger that bubbles. Catches his lip between his teeth and waits until his father is close enough to reach out and touch before standing.

“I’m sorry,” Lyle says. He’s been drinking because Arthur can smell it. Smells something flowery and sweet too that reminds him of Gemma and the ladies at the table back at Gil’s saloon.

The memories of the afternoon return, painfully bright. Sitting and talking with Peter. Watching the street and the people go about their daily lives. And now here he was. Back where he started.

They go back to catch another cable car in silence. The lamppost lighters voice fading as they walked.

_How well do I yet remember_  
_ I remember, I remember_  
How well do I yet remember  
For the thought of her is one that never dies

* * *

They travel south a bit once they leave San Francisco. Keeping along the coast and sleeping mainly under the stars, though when they chanced across a town or a farm, they’d seek charity, and found for the most part, it was readily given. In meals and in sleeping quarters.

About four months they travel like this.

And then they bank east. They find themselves under the dense canopies of forest so thick it looked like twilight in midday. And beautiful country it was too.

Before they left the last town they were in, Arthur had sold a pocket watch and a chipped mirror he had taken back in San Francisco and bought with the money a small journal and a pencil. Out that way, in the valley, he tries to draw. He’s not very good. The mountains look off and the trees don’t look right. Lyle watches over his shoulder at the campfire and doesn’t say a word. Until one day, he does.

“What’s that?” He asks gruffly. They are camped in the foothills of a mountain and Lyle is going about the work of drying out a bear pelt. The smoke and the acrid smell of fur and animal fat making Arthur’s eyes water. He blinks away the sting and looks up to find his father nodding towards his lap where his journal lay open.

“It’s that bison that we seen the other day,” Arthur explains. It looks like a loaf of bread someone stepped on and stuck some stubby sticks at the bottom in way of legs. He sighs and leans against the pine at his back. A bit more money and maybe a camera would do him better.

“‘S pretty good,” Lyle murmurs, bending over to fan at the embers of their fire. “Where’d you learn it? Them Hastings again?”

“Nah, I wasn’t taught by nobody.”

Lyle makes a noise at the back of his throat and settles on the ground, wiping at his forehead with a handkerchief.

“We’re going back up to Oregon come winter,” he says.

Arthur looks up. Wants to ask if he’s still got that price on his back and decides against it.

“Only for a minute,” Lyle continues. “Lookin’ for a friend of mine.”

“Nat?”

Lyle studies him a moment. Nods once.

They don’t speak after it.  


* * *

They were only gone for half a year, and Oregon hasn’t changed. Arthur hadn’t expected it to. It’s late winter, when they make it back that way. They had good weather. The skies stayed clear and they never ran into any of those blinding white blizzards. The furs Lyle treated back in California providing them a constant warmth.

Somewhere between here and there, Arthur caught something that had his stomach churning and his nose full.

It’s rotten luck.

Lyle tries to talk.

Asked him what he got up to back home. Asks in roundabout sorts of ways if his ma ever spoke of him, and if she did, was it ever unkind. Arthur wants to ask him right back what he did for them that ever _was_ kind aside from staying well away.

He finds that as time goes on, his bitterness grows. He had it good with the Hastings. They put him to work like he was one of their own and it was alright. He was never far from home, and that felt good too. He was fed and treated well, but now he was weary and tired. Running from and to who knows what.

And _damned_ sick to top it all off. And the man—the stranger—who on paper alone called himself his father wasn’t making things much easier. Come to think of it, Arthur doubted anything between he and his mother was ever on paper to begin with.

He coughs around the cold in his chest, leans over the side of his saddle and spits in the snow.

“You sound like a broken wheel back there with all that rattling,” Lyle comments dryly.

Arthur rolls his eyes.

“You ain’t never said what you did to rack up five hundred dollars.”

“And I don’t have to. Now hush it.”

“Don’t you think it’s fair, though?”

Lyle brings his horse to a stop so abruptly, Arthur has to pull at his reins to avoid running into him. When he looks up, he’s met with an unbridled anger that almost makes him regret talking back.

Almost.

“Let’s get somethin’ straight between you ‘n me, Arthur,” his father says. “This was never my plan, _you_,” a gloved finger aimed at his chest, “were never my plan. The only reason you ain’t back at Saint Gabriels is because I respect your ma too much. And she loved you. And maybe—”

“Well, she’s dead now!”

“That’s the point!” Lyle shouts. “Life ain’t fair! You work as hard as you can and it...it takes from you. It takes _everything_ sometimes!”

Arthur hadn’t cried for awhile. Not when his ma died or anytime after, and he doesn’t now. Though it’s a fight to. 

Lyle is looking off in the opposite direction in silence. He brings a fist to the bottom of his nose. Coughs a bit. Nudges his horse forward.

Arthur waits until he’s almost disappeared up the road and follows at a slow pace.

* * *

They reach a town called Millers Peak that Arthur only recognizes by name. It’s where the trading post was. They reach the town early one morning and then, they stay well out of it.

They make camp in the woods, taking care to keep their fire low and the radius of their footprints scarce.

Arthur feels worst but he doesn’t say it. Worst in a lot of ways for a lot of different reasons. Lyle shrugs on his coat, rolling a cigar between his fingers and announces he’ll be back.

About an hour and a half passes before Arthur hears voices. Close.

He pockets his knife and stomps out the fire. Follows the voices carefully in a zigzag until he reaches a road and once there, the scene before him has his blood turning to ice.

“—is him alright,” a man is saying. He and another are standing with their backs to Arthur as yet another crouches low to the ground, pinning an all too familiar figure to the snow covered forest floor. “The last of them Campbell boys. Where _is_ ol’ Nat anyway, Morgan?”

“I ain’t seen him in over a year,” Lyle hisses. The man at his back hauls him up and Arthur winces at the bruises peppering his face.

“You mean to tell me,” the first man presses, “Nathaniel Campbell’s _right hand man_ don’t know where he is?”

Lyle spits at the man’s shoe.

The one holding him pulls back a fist, and the first raises a hand to stop him.

“What’re you doing in town stealin’ medicine for anyways? Pretty bold. You sick?”

Arthur chews at the inside of his cheek as his father presses his lips together.

“Listen, Morgan,” the other finally speaks. “Just tell us where Nat is and we’ll see to it the judge goes easy on you. Okay? He ain’t worth holding your tongue over.”

_Just make something up,_ the voice in Arthur’s head chants. He watches as the air in the forest suddenly stands still and his father squints around the bruising at his eye at the men.

“I’m done lying,” Lyle chokes out. “I ain’t seen Nat. And that’s it. The truth.”

There’s a beat of tense silence and the man holding him suddenly gives him a brusque shove forward, whipping something silver gray from his hip in the same fluid motion.

“My brother didn’t deserve what you and them gave him back then,” he snarls.

The report is echoing in his ears long after its sound. A flock of black birds take to the sky, their raucous cawing sounding as though Arthur were listening from underwater.

The trees around him seem to close in on him, and Arthur steadies himself against the trunk of the one that obscures him as the bounty hunters take his father away.

When they’re gone and all that remains is his fathers hat and the disturbed snow, he creeps out, grabbing the hat and races back to the makeshift camp.

And for the first, real time in his life, he felt well and truly alone.

Abandoned.

And alone.

But if there was one thing Arthur Morgan was good at, it was surviving.

He takes his money. He takes the hat, the dried flower. His horse.

He heads back towards California.  


**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: morgan-arthur 
> 
> (This was a lot longer. Included the first time Arthur meets Dutch and Hosea/his life alone after Lyle died, but I cut it up for plot pacing reasons.)


End file.
